[ale] Favorite distros

[Charles Marcus]

> From: Joseph A. Knapka
> Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 2:09 PM
>
> That is nice, agreed. Package management, when done right,
> seems to be a Very God Thing. I may share your opinion
> of Slackware after using Gentoo for a while. However,
> one problem I have with Gentoo (and all the other
> distros that rely heavily on a package-management system)
> is that if the package you're interested in doesn't
> exist for the distro, or even worse, exists but is broken in
> some way (cf my recent "VNC on Gentoo" post), there's no
> clear way to fix the problem.

Many times, it is an ebuild problem.  Since ebuilds are simply bash scripts,
if you can bash, you very likely can fix it.  Sorry to say, my bash skills
are about as good as my email/politick skills - which means, pretty bad.  :)

> One reason I use Linux is to not be dependent on
> someone else to fix this kind of thing. I've found
> hacks to get VNC and Zope to install on Gentoo, but
> they weren't trivial, and worse, if I have to re-
> install these packages I'll have to do the same ugly
> hacks again, because Portage blows your homebuilt
> fixes away if you ever do "emerge sync". Perhaps some
> better Portage-fu on my part would resolve this, but
> that is distro-specific -fu -- one nice thing about
> Slack is that most of the stuff you learn there is
> applicable to any distro, or even any random version
> of Unix you happen to encounter.

The best answer (as far as Gentoo is concerned) is to submit an ebuild and
get it into the main Portage tree.  Of course, again, if you're
bash-crippled like me...

Also, the docs do tell you what to do if you make lots of changes to your
local tree - don't remember off the top of my head what though.

Charles


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